Where Do All Your Used Clothes Ultimately End Up?

When you clean out your closet and fill up a bag to donate to Goodwill or the Salvation Army with stuff that no longer fits or you just don’t want, it might be the end of your time with those high-waisted jeans or Barenaked Ladies concert tee. But it’s just the beginning of a long, winding path that can terminate thousands of miles and an ocean away.

Slate has an excerpt from the new book Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion, where author Elizabeth L. Cline visits a few stops along the secondhand clothes highway.

First up is a Salvation Army in Brooklyn that also acts as a sorting and distribution center for eight Salvation Army locations in the area.

In a back room, dozens of women sort through an average of five tons of new arrivals every day. Out of that mountain, they can select exactly 11,200 garments, which are then distributed to among the affiliated Salvation Army stores.

“We never run out of clothes,” an assistant supervisor at the center tells Cline. “There are always enough clothes.”

Rejected clothes are then taken into a separate warehouse and pressed into half-ton bales. Cline says that just this one Salvation Army center churns out 36 of these bales on an average day.

These bales then go to any of the thousands of textile recyclers in the country who once again sift through the donated clothes to pull out still wearable items — and the occasional vintage gem that has gone unnoticed.

Cline visited one processor in New Jersey that takes in around 17 million pounds every year.

“I like to call it the good, the bad, and the ugly,” says the company’s president. “We get everything from torn sweaters to spoiled and stained towels to good useable clothing.”

And it’s the “good” portion of that trinity that then gets sorted, shrink-wrapped and baled for sale to used-clothing companies, many of whom then sell the garments overseas.

“[B]y one estimate, used clothing is now the United States’ number one export by volume, with the overwhelming majority sent to ports in sub-Saharan Africa,” writes Cline.

Even when the clothing reaches the shores of some other country, it’s not necessarily the end of the road, as used-clothing customers aren’t just blindly snapping up the clothes you no longer want. As economies develop and customers become more worldly, they are also becoming more selective about their purchases.

Asks Cline:

As incomes rise in Africa, tastes become more savvy, cheap Chinese imports of new clothes flood those countries, and our own high-quality clothing supply is depleted, it’s foreseeable that the African solution to our overconsumption may come to an end. What then?

To clarify, since I cut off an important part of the quote by mistake…they’re pressed into half-ton bales. But somehow out of five tons of clothes a day they get 36 half-ton bales a day, i.e. 18 tons? Does not computer.

That’s crazy, that we have millions of pounds of clothing each year that is donated and actually not put back into circulation in the U.S. You just can’t even fathom that by only going to thrift stores, if they only keep a fraction of that.

A part of it is that a lot of what we donate nobody else wants to pay money for. I have a good 20 shirts in my closet that have specific names/events on them. Those don’t sell well. And if it’s in too bad of shape for me to keep, why would someone else want it?

I have seen some of what people “give” away, and it’s not always that much of a gift.

“As incomes rise in Africa, tastes become more savvy, cheap Chinese imports of new clothes flood those countries, and our own high-quality clothing supply is depleted, it’s foreseeable that the African solution to our overconsumption may come to an end. What then?”

What then? Seriously? They even need to ask?

The clothes will go into landfills, which is exactly where they’d head if the Salvation Army didn’t take them.

I’d rather picture a scenario in which mountains and gullies of old turtlenecks and acid-washed denim accrete on blighted thoroughfares in desolate cityscapes. The ice rink in Rockefeller Center filled up with “All Your Base” t-shirts, that kind of thing.

I used to live in a small town that had a donation trunk located in a parking area near the town square. It was a well-crafted little piece of outdoor furniture that anyone could open up and peruse what was inside without the inside contents being subjected too much to the elements. People were considerate and closed the trunk when they weren’t donating or taking from it. Probably not an ideal solution for most neighborhoods, but it worked well there.

I hope this doesn’t discourage people from donating. I’d like to know what types of clothing they are overrun with, and what they still need. For example, I bet they have lots of t-shirts, but maybe they are short on something like winter coats.

Coats should go to Coats for Kids or similar, for targeted redistribution.

Don’t donate to the Salvation Army. They be evil. If you donate to smaller organizations, you’re donations have a better chance of being resold instead of trashed. Don’t buy from the Salvation Army. They will use your money to oppose human rights reform in developing countries.

I’m all in favor of exporting perfectly good used clothes to places where people need them and will buy them. I’m not in favor of the Salvation Army getting the money for that transaction.

Sorry for the late reply. You can read the “controversy” section on their wikipedia page for a summary, but over the last decade and a half, at least, they have been consistently opposed to equality and even in some cases basic human rights. They have twice threatened to close all their soup kitchens in New York if forced to comply with existing laws that require institutions receiving public funds to not discriminate against protected classes in their hiring and benefits. They have campaigned against human rights reform in developing countries, using money donated to them and earned from selling donations, with the threat of interruption of services. Most people aren’t aware of this and think they’re helping people when they give their clothes to these wingnuts.

This is why religious organizations should not be given public funds for any reason, and why we should not rely on them to administer charity, especially internationally. When you donate, please donate to secular charities. As a rule, they are more likely to not decide to deliberately screw over some segment of the population for ideological reasons. Goodwill, for example, uses your donations to fund job training, not preaching.

What is the textile recycling process for the items that are not wearable? It doesn’t sound like clothes have to go to landfills if that process is in place.

Or is this another instance of the word recycle being used when “reuse” should be used? Is no actual recycling taking place beyond sorting to see if anything is wearable to send to Africa (vs wearable to send to stores in the USA)

Most fibers can be recycled in some context, though not necessarily as well as others. Cotton gets less and less useful the shorter the fibers get, so there’s limited life for it. Synthetics have different properties in a garment but are hard to tell apart as small, broken fibers.

Most of it can be used for making paper and packing materials, if nothing else. Knitters and crocheters among us (including myself) often know how to take old t-shirts, sheets, etc, and turn them into recycled yarn. I make reusable shopping backs this way and use them as gift bags for holiday and birthday presents.

I usually wear all of my clothes until they are worn into tatters. Since I tend to buy everything larger than I really need, they never become too small. Once they are unable to be worn in public, I’ll wear them around the house only until they literally fall apart. When that happens, they become trashcan fodder. I still have clothes that I used to wear in high school…and I graduated in 1993….

I’m like that too. Once they have too many holes to become unwearable, I cut T-shirts up for cleaning rags and turn jeans into ‘work’ clothes when painting/oiling/yardwork. After the yardwork further destroys the clothing, only then to they get trashed.

Same here. Old shirts and pants are very useful for wearing when mowing the yard, working in the garden, or doing things like painting a room, staining a deck, etc. It doesn’t matter if you get red deck stain all over a pair of pants you’ve had since 1999. If an article of clothing isn’t totally shredded, I can probably still use it.

Yeah, I still wear many of the clothes I had in HS, 1992 for me. I wear shirts until the sleeves fall off and pants until they have no ass left, and when they get to that condition, they make good shop rags. I think my yearly clothing budget averages out to less than $50 because most clothes do last a while.

my clothing cycle goes like this:
1. wear to work
2. wear to the grocery store
3. wear around the house on days off
4. wear for yardwork/crafts/painting
5. stuff in old pillowcases for cat beds
6. cleaning rags
7a.cotton gets cut into strips and braided into lampwicks for my kerosene citronella lamps and burned
7b. synthetics go in the trash

No way is this true!
Either scrap metal or paper to be recycled is the largest export by volume.
Another phony statistic made up out of whole cloth [deliberate pun].
Enormous numbers of shipping containers go back to China with our old newspapers & cardboard, which then is made into the boxes that the Chinese ship their crappy, contaminated & shittily made junk back here.
Otherwise, they go back empty.
At least one person in China has made herself a billionaire recycling paper from America.

“I remember the tiny closets in the homes of elderly relatives growing up, the kind that held 10 outfits.”

I live in a house built in the 1920’s, and my wife uses both closets in the master bedroom and I use a spare bedroom closet. And those closets are still small compared to the walk-in monsters closets people have today.

I’m not sure what’s happened at our local Goodwill store. I used to be able to get lots of nice clothes for work. About a year or so ago, that stopped. Now I’m lucky to find one or two shirts every month or so. My theory is the economy has finally caught up with the people who were donating clothes in my size, and they’re keeping them longer instead of donating each season.

It’s usually easier just to go to KMart and WalMart and scour through the deep clearance racks. Prices are about the same, and the clothes are new.

The quality of your local charity thrift store depends upon the store’s location. But on the whole, the majority of the ‘good’ clothing is shipped overseas. The charity makes more money on that nice wool suit selling it in Africa than they do locally. It’s been like that since the 80s. Your best bets are the local charity shops, those without big networks sending stuff overseas.

My parents are snow birds. My mother told me that she regularly visited a place in southern Texas that had some of these bales and sold the clothes by the pound. It sounded more like a crap shoot where you literally bought a bag of clothes by the pound rather than getting to pick and choose what you wanted. I wish I could remember the details better.

I think one-third of my shirts come from places like Goodwill and Salvation Army. Sometimes I get really lucky and find several in a row on the racks that were just donated from somebody my size. I have several pieces from Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger and I can’t remember the last time I’ve bought from either label new.

Whenever it’s closet cleaning time in my house, mine and my husband’s clothes get brought to a local thrift store whose proceeds go to a nonprofit rape crisis counseling center that also provides emergency shelter for domestic abuse victims. Baby clothes get brought to a local consignment store where unsold items are donated to a nonprofit organization that provides clothes, diapers and other necessities to low-income families. There have been time sin my life when a thrift store blouse was a luxury item to me; I am fortunate that now that I am better off, I can give my clothes a second life where they can help people in my community.

“As incomes rise in Africa, tastes become more savvy, cheap Chinese imports of new clothes flood those countries, and our own high-quality clothing supply is depleted, it’s foreseeable that the African solution to our overconsumption may come to an end. What then?”

In my area, all of the charity thrift stores carry junk. Yea. You could comb the whole store and find one pair of pants or one shirt, but for the same price or one dollar more I can buy something similar on sale at the big box store. There I’d spend less time searching. I’d know the item fits (no dressing room in our thrift stores). And I don’t have to smell mold as I hunt around the shop. Really, when did the prices at the thrift stores get so high? $10 for a used shirt that’s not even good quality?